My Case Against God

First Principle: Evidence is the best, most reliable way for humans to approximate truth as we interrogate the world of experience.

Monday, September 3, 2012

Extraterrestrial Life as a Statistical Certainty

Throughout
history, men of religion have striven to place humanity and, by
extension, Earth at the center of everything. From wrongheaded
notions of a geocentric universe to fanciful delusions of humankind
having been specially created in the image of a god, the breathtaking
ego our species exhibits—a self-importance enabled through, and
justified by, religion—desperately has to be exorcised, like a
malevolent demon from a pious innocent. In this brief post, I shall
tackle the contention that Earth is special and worthy of its
enviable standing because it is a planet on which life emerged.

In
Lawrence Krauss' fascinating book A Universe From Nothing, he
makes multiple mentions of the 400 billion galaxies in the observable
universe, of which our Milky Way galaxy is merely one. The Milky Way
galaxy contains 200
to 400 billion stars, which, it should be noted, is not a uniquely
high number; for instance, the Andromeda galaxy hosts one trillion
stars, which rather makes the Milky Way seem puny by comparison. And, as Popular Science has reported, on average, each star in the Milky Way has at least one
planet (and probably more than one).

So,
how can we extrapolate the probability of life on other planets from
these facts and figures? We cannot demonstrate its existence for
sure, of course, but we can statistically prove the tremendous,
overwhelming likelihood of its being there.

If
the Milky Way contains something like 300 billion stars, then, for
purposes of our statistical analysis, let's be conservative and halve
that number to 150 billion stars as the average number across all 400
billion galaxies in the observable universe. (Remember, this is
hardly an outlandish estimate, considering that the Andromeda galaxy
hosts a trillion stars.) And let's say that every star has a single
planet on average. (Again, this is an extremely conservative
estimate, given that, as Popular
Science quoted
astronomer Seth Shostak as having said, “[T]he number of planets in
the Milky Way is probably like five or 10 times the number of
stars.”) So, that's 400 billion (times) 150 billion (times) one to
arrive at 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the observable
universe.

Let's set the odds of life ever emerging on any given planet at a
million to one. In that case, life would emerge on
60,000,000,000,000,000 planets.

Let's
set the odds of life ever emerging on any given planet at a billion
to one. In that case, life would emerge on 60,000,000,000,000
planets.

Finally,
let's set the odds of life ever emerging on any given planet at 10
billion to
one. In that case, life would emerge on 6,000,000,000,000 planets.
That means if the odds of life emerging are 10 billion to one, then
life would emerge on about six
trillion
planets. As Lawrence Krauss astutely observes, "[T]he universe is big and old and, as a result, rare events happen all the time." Extraterrestrial life is a statistical certainty.If
Darwin illuminated biology by removing the need for a creator, and
the Copernican Revolution demythologized astronomy by removing Earth
from the center of anything, then perhaps this statistical argument
will give the lie to religion-fueled delusions about life on Earth,
including humans like us, being special...let alone lovingly and
uniquely created.